“The desire to do something really wonderful, and the worry that it’s really awful—and how to rebound from those two situations. I think the most difficult thing is looking at your work and understanding what to edit, and what not to do. I mean there are a million decisions you have to make, and I guess, in the end, one hopes to not be boring. That would horrify me until the end of time if I thought my work was boring.
You also have to have perseverance—and maybe that’s the hardest thing, to persevere and to believe that what you’re doing is worth doing—and to do it, rather than talking about doing it.”
(Source: the99percent.com)
“What are stories,” he said on the stage at TED, “but mystery boxes? … There’s no answer to the box that’s going to make you happy,” he acknowledges. “The key is to use the box as a bait, to grab people and bring them into one story, only to introduce another.” In “Lost,” he says, the island was the lure, but the characters were the glue, and most viewers, he ventures, were content to have spent time with them, no matter how it concluded.
Tell me a little about your background – what path led you to photography?
In January 2009, after a few years of internal soul searching, due to a realisation I had still yet to find my ‘true creative calling’ and a growing disenchantment in working as a graphic designer for studios, I decided to take a year out and teach myself the skills required to break into the photography industry, with an emphasis in the food area due to my personal love of home cooking, a passion for food styling and also an utter adoration for a handful of Aussie and Scandinavian food photographers who featured monthly in the array of stunning Aussie food magazines and book publications I had come to love over my years visiting and living in Oz. I studied photography as a substantial part of my design degree in art college years back and always had a yearning to get more heavily involved in this area.
In February 2009, I decided to bite the bullet, completely stopped working in design and started getting up each morning at 7am to cook, style and shoot 3-4 recipes everyday in an effort to build a portfolio of work so that 12 months or so down the line I might be able to start picking up some small jobs. I learnt a lot through failures but as the year went on I started to see a decent progression. I moved to Sydney in March 2010 and since then my professional photography career has taken off in leaps and bounds.
I was amazed when I read this and realized how hard she had worked to get to where she is now. Inspiring. “The life I want, there is no shortcut.”
